Molecule Design News

Written by Ellen Berkovitch, October 11, 2012. Re-posted from Adobe Airstream

Design Lab at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art last Friday night presented entries including a tornado house fantasy design for windy midwestern cities, an urban backyard chicken coop with implications for the biological clock of the chickens, and “intriguing innovations in form” across visionary built and unbuilt projects in furniture, lighting and architecture. (Design Lab was part of the Santa Fe Interior Designers Presents weekend of events, with sponsorship by Creative Santa Fe and Zane Bennett Contemporary Art.)

Kramer E. Woodard of K.E.W. Architects, Albuquerque, won the professional prize ($1,500) for a pre-fabricated building system, Penthouse Prototype, that is part of Woodard’s patented pre-fab enterprise, Slider Structure Systems (S3). Envisioned as having potential in settings from worker housing to classrooms, the penthouse prototype Woodard submitted is for an urban rooftop site and incorporates key elements of the S3 design including a double-channel ”T-post” assembly to facilitate the sliding together (and easier disassembly) of interior or exterior wall panels made of wood, glass, metal or composite materials, along with a photo-voltaic brise-soleil.

Woodard wrote in his application: ”Compaction of our cities is rapidly becoming more important than ever, given our energy / environmental concerns. Slider Structure Systems, (S3) is a prefabricated building system that offers a unique solution in part to these concerns. This patented wall system design described in this submission can be implemented in other applications, here however the investigation focuses on the use of an existing roof as a building site.”

Interviewed by the Santa Fe New Mexican in 2008, at the time of the patent approvals for S3, Woodard described its development (since 2005). Woodard who also shared in a 2009 Jeff Harnar Award for Contemporary Architecture was associate architect on the Turbulence House in Abiquiu, New Mexico, a project that architect Steven Holl (currently on tap to design an expansion to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston) designed for artists Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and Richard Tuttle. (A second edition was created for a sculpture park in Vicenza, Italy.)

Residents of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Utah were invited to apply for the Design Lab competition, which netted some two dozen finalists. Four jurors — Laura Carpenter, creative director of Creative Santa Fe and the principal of LC Projects; Michael McCoy, of Denver, Colorado, who has designed the Horizon light for Humanscale and the Bulldog chair for Knoll; Susan S. Szenasy, the editor-in-chief of Metropolis magazine; and Suzanne Tick of Suzanne Tick Inc., and former creative director of Knoll Textiles from 1997 to 2005 — judged the entries and awarded the winners.

Kramer E. Woodard’s penthouse prototype submission took the professional prize from Design Lab

Caitlyn Blythe, a student at University of Colorado at Denver, took the student prize ($1000) for “digital dresses,” which she described in her application as a “hybridization of fashion and architecture.” A dress form makes a “digital replica” of the female body and is the form on which 3D garment design is effected into objects that are parametrically tabbed and laser-cut before being assembled from flat panels. Blythe modeled one on Friday night.

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About Adriana Siso

Adriana Siso launched Molecule Design in September 2010, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Molecule is the extension of a previous furniture design store that was founded in 2003 as an expansion on a career in fine art, which she pursued for more than 30 years.
She brings her talents and uncompromising quest for practical and original products to the world of home furnishings and space design. Molecule carries contemporary industrial designer products that are approachable, remarkable, cutting edge, made to last, life enhancing, sometimes irreverent, and timeless.
Later in 2006, Adriana started the process of conceiving the new showroom space that would house the store. Partly sustainable, the structure was built out of 11 recycled 40′ cargo containers. Completed in December 2010, it became the first cargo container building in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Always an explorer, Adriana loves to engage in the realms of discovery and innovation. InContext/Molecule Design's Magazine, launched in December 2011, is the venue where she collects the great stories of creative thinkers, who in our current state of affairs, sometimes under great pressures and working outside the realm of imposed standards, achieve the impossible. It has been known that in times of great crisis, design flourishes. It is Molecule's mission to show this light.